Why is Brave Wallet so difficult?

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I’m a software engineer with >20 years experience who has recently started working in Blockchain. I’ve been involved in Crypto Coins/Tokens for over 5 years and I’ve got probably 6 or 7 different wallets. I’ve used the Brave browser on or off for probably 5 years as well, more so in the last year.
I wasn’t in any hurry to get a Brave wallet because of all of the other wallets I’ve got, but finally I decided to give it a go, primarily because I thought it might be more user friendly and seamlessly integrated than some of the others. At very least I assumed that the Brave wallet would easily manage and handle my accumulating BATs.

Boy was I wrong!!

You have to get a wallet with some other third party provider and then jump through hoops to synchronise and link your Brave wallet across the various devices!! And what’s more, in the third party provider your account has to be verified with official ID (at least in some jurisdictions) - that runs completely counter to the fundamental philosophy of blockchain-based crypto tokens. I can accept that it may be a legal requirement for funding/withdrawing with fiat, but not for pure cryto-based stuff!!

What’s the deal Brave?

The biggest blocker to uptake in the Crypto space is the (rightly) perceived complexities of handling one’s tokens (money, basically). If a someone with significant experience in tech finds it laborious then you can be damn sure that the ordinary person is almost never going to get through it.

As software engineers our job is to write systems that are as easy as possible for the intended users. In the case of crypto wallets your intended users are anybody who has access to the internet.

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No you don’t. Not for Brave Wallet. What it sounds like is you’re talking about Brave Rewards, which won’t pay directly to Wallet because it needs to go through KYC/AML. Brave uses custodial partners to handle that, which is where you’d need Gemini or Uphold. But if you’re just using Brave Wallet, you don’t need to have any other “third party provider” unless/until you want to move it to your bank. (again, because Brave doesn’t have licenses and all for that, so you have to go to an exchange to convert to cash)

It’s pretty easy. All you had to do is Restore and put in your Seed phrase on each device. It’s that simple. I mean, it’s basically same way to do Sync, but it’s two different codes.

Again, you’re referencing Rewards and not Brave Wallet. These are two different things. With Brave Wallet you just send/swap/receive BAT from anywhere and to anywhere, just so long as you have the gas.

It’s fiat being converted to BAT, which is then being paid out. Legally this is heavily monitored and controlled because many governments (especially the United States), claims that cryptocurrency is used often to fund terrorism and for money laundering. So it’s not “pure crypto-based stuff.” Even if it was, you really should go research and learn how governments are becoming very strict over crypto and have a lot of regulations in place. They are even starting to target defi/DEX.

Not sure why you think that. It’s pretty simple. I have no experience in tech and woul dbe considered an “ordinary person” but have been able to figure out Rewards with no issues. I just downloaded the browser, enabled Brave Ads, signed up for Uphold and submitted documentation, started receiving BAT, withdraw to my bank, and then use the money for whatever I want. Sure, it might be more steps than just creating an email account at Hotmail or something, but it wasn’t hard to figure out.

Now, if you want to talk about crypto in general, I’d agree it gets more complicated. I mean, having to figure out gas fees, differences in types of tokens, learning how to properly invest, determining the type of wallet you’d like to use, etc. Brave is actually working on making things easier to understand for people with a lack of knowledge and/or experience with crypto.

They have done this and they are always improving everything as they go alone. Just keep in mind as a User, we’re also expected to read instructions. Based on the things you have written here, you’ve failed to even read and understand a single thing. You’ve spoken as if talking about just one product but you kept mixing up two different products, Rewards and Wallet.

Sometimes people think they know it all. They get years of experience in something and consider themselves experts who don’t need to check. You’ve been a software engineer, surely you can just install a web browser and run it with no issues, right? Yet Brave isn’t like all other browsers. Sure, there’s a lot of similarities with it and Chrome since they both are Chromium, but Brave has Wallet, Playlist, Shields, and other things that make it unique. If you come in and make assumptions it’s “just like the others” then you’re going to find yourself sorely mistaken. It’s almost like trying to plug in an American electrical cord into a wall outlet in England. It’s just not going to work.

And you’ve perhaps dabbled in cryptocurrency so you assume an expert. Every wallet and exchange is different though. Brave isn’t all the other crypto that you’ve invested or mined, as it’s not innately handled that way through Rewards. Brave Wallet will be closer to what you’ve handled before and likely is simple too, unless you’ve only ever used crypto exchanges. Again though, you have to remember Rewards and Wallet are different things.

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With all due respect, lashing out a defensive response misses the point entirely.
You can emphasise the difference between a wallet and Rewards and how these are separate things, but Brave markets its browser as being user focused with BAT accumulation as an incentive and a built-in wallet for ease of use in the crypto defi market. To an outsider, particularly a non-tech user, the understandable expectation would be that BAT rewards should be seamlessly integrated with the Brave wallet and accumulate automatically across synchronised devices.

If you read nothing else read my last line -

As software engineers our job is to write systems that are as easy as possible for the intended users. In the case of crypto wallets your intended users are anybody who has access to the internet.

@Saoiray If you’re directly employed in the Brave software engineering department, then I say challenge yourself to do better - technological innovation is worthless if it doesn’t improve to users’ engagement and experience. I would like to see Brave succeed and be the best/most innovative player in browser development and use because I like the supposed ethos and motivation for the Brave browser. But I’m not paid by Brave so it really doesn’t matter to me in the slightest if it fails.

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Nope, I’m not. I’m a normal User. I do spend a lot of time helping people here, but I don’t get paid for it. I wasn’t kidding when I said I’m just an “ordinary” person. I mean, most of my life was spent working as a security officer and in retail, with most of my jobs never lasting more than a year. I have a college degree, but it’s just an A.A. in General Studies. I did volunteer with nonprofits and was on a Board of Directors where I was the Chief Compliance Officer, but that’s just because I’m really good at paying attention to things and was able to help them navigate laws and regulations.

Then in 2010 I almost died at work due to a traumatic brain injury. After a lifetime of issues, finally had proper assessments and was found to be autistic, what would have been called “Asperger’s” in the past.

Beyond basic HTML I learned in high school back around 2002, I know very little when it comes to programming. I can use about any program you put in front of me, but that’s just because I read everything and learn to experiment.

As to why I spend time here helping people,. it’s because I don’t have much to do. I’m on SSDI and spend most of my day at home. So it’s helping people here and on Reddit, watching anime, reading manga, and doing whatever little chores I need to do. Basically, it’s a way to kill time.

Just a FYI, not what I was doing at all. It’s part of my autism and personality combined. I just speak bluntly. It’s not defensive or even there to attack. It’s just me speaking directly to you and responding to what you have said, pointing out what things weren’t correct.

On top of that, was also pointing out the issues I see with humanity in general. We tend to make a lot of assumptions and sometimes become too prideful in ourselves. A lot of the issues I’ve seen people sharing here on Brave Community could have been prevented if people did read through articles at the Help Center, which you can see at https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us (and yes, a lot of stuff also is outdated. Even their terms were dated in 2019 and spoke as if Uphold was coming in the future. I pointed it out to them recently and it should all be getting updated soon)

Also, because I saw a lot of people missing that, I had done a FAQ that’s been shared around and tends to come up on top of Google results when looking up topics. You can see that at -Retired- PSA: User FAQ - Support & Answers

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I know you said “if” and left it open, but figured I’d also point out the fun in this. In that initial response of mine, I mentioned about how people make assumptions. I used the example that they assume they’ll know how things work.

I’ll assume in this that you saw the Community Ninja title and thought maybe it meant I’m employed with Brave. I know it’s been a mistake made by others in the past, so it’s not hard to imagine. But like I said about how people often don’t look into things first, if had gone to my profile and checked out Badges, would have seen:

Profile - Saoiray - Brave Community - Brave 10_5_2022 22_47_45

Yet at the same time, that requires extra effort that a lot of people don’t want to take. Which then can lead people to make wrong assumptions. It really is quite interesting how our brains work.

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Again with all due respect, none of this is on-topic.

You’re not really representative of the intended audience, or indeed of the intended Brave userbase. Of course there will always be users of any system who have no problem going through various steps to achieve anything and who are very happy to delve into the idiosyncrasies of the system and learn what they need to about that system. But a software engineer should be thinking first and foremost about the lowest common denominator of the userbase - if a UX is natural/intuitive/user-friendly for that person then it’s going to be good for all users and is most likely to have massive take-up.

Of course there are systems whose userbase is necessarily quite esoteric. For example, a software engineer implementing a system for managing and controlling a nuclear power plant can reasonably expect the users to be highly specialised and knowledgeable and to receive detailed training on the system. However, even with such an assumption, it still behoves the software engineer to make that system as functionally obvious and user-friendly as possible. S/he should still try to implement it in a way that someone with the appropriate domain knowledge of nuclear power generation could sit down with no exposure to the system and very quickly and easily understand how to control the plant without the risk of causing a meltdown.

Software engineers are paid to do the hard work so that the hundreds/thousands/millions of users don’t have to. (Do the maths - if there’s a userbase of 1,000,000 users and each takes, on average, even an extra 10 minutes to achieve something, that one software engineer spending even 6 months could bring down to 5 minutes, then it’s a no-brainer.)

Brave is a browser. The brave wallet is (marketed as) an integrated crypto wallet. BAT is a crypto token promoted by Brave for rewarding Brave users for attending to advertisements. The whole lot should work together seamlessly.

Imagine this - you’re sitting with your laptop and decide to go into Amazon to buy a new pair of sweet, wireless headphones. You fire up Brave and find the headphones, put them in your cart and go to checkout. Brave shows a message - ‘You have 531 BAT. Would you like to pay with this?’. Just then your SO walks in looking how they do when they mean business and all of that is forgotten. Half an hour later (or two hours in my case :wink: ) you pick up your phone and your Brave browser has a notification - ‘Would you like to complete your purchase of those sweet sweet headphones?’ You click ‘Yes’ and bang, you’ve got your headphones (delivered within minutes by a trusty drone).

The userbase for a browser is basically everybody in the whole world. Ideally, the userbase for a crypto wallet is also everybody in the whole world. We want everyone to be able to use a wallet for all their monetary activities. Don’t think of yourself and your own experiences and abilities. Imagine your grandparent trying to get started with online financial activities of any sort - even just ordering and paying for groceries to be delivered. Imagine if you could download and install Brave for them and then simply say ‘There you go - everything you need will just happen in there. Oh, and if you want to earn some money to pay for your groceries just agree when it asks you if you’re happy to see advertisements’. Brave with the BAT-based rewards mechanism and the integrated wallet should be that simple.

Is that possible right now? Nope. But that should be the goal of the Brave Software Engineers.

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